3 Steps To Cure Job Stress In Time For Your Next Coffee Break

When it comes to their working life, the level of on-the-job stress is the aspect that Americans are most dissatisfied with, according to a recent Gallup poll. Another survey from Harris Interactive found that three-quarters of us are feeling tense about our jobs, with factors such as bad bosses, annoying colleagues and inadequate salaries leading the list of woes.

While an astonishing 75% of workers are hunting for new gigs, the current sluggish job market means many of them will be stuck in their current positions for the foreseeable future. But being locked into a less-than-fulfilling job doesn’t have to mean courting an ulcer. In fact, there’s an easy way for just about anyone to decrease their work-related mental tension – it requires asking yourself two questions and adopting a quick little mind trick. When stressed-out friends and colleagues ask me how I keep calm and carry on, here’s the secret I share with them:

Step 1

Ask: Is there anything I can do about this situation?

Once you have identified what the issues are that are contributing to your stress, it’s time to assess whether or not there is a concrete action you can take to rectify them. Understanding and accepting that there are elements of your working life and work relationships that are beyond your control is critical to reducing your on-the-job anxiety. You cannot defuse union-management tensions singlehandedly. You cannot pull your industry out of a slump. You cannot cure your CEO's meglomania. You cannot make the subway less crowded on your morning commute. And if you can’t affect these things, then using precious mental energy to curse them is a waste of your time. Once you realize that there are factors beyond your control, you also realize trying to control them anyway is degrading the quality of your working life.

Step 2

Ask: If I can do something, will the potential positives outweigh the negatives?

But what if there is something you can do about the situation? What if you can buy a car instead of enduring the subway or request that your cubicle neighbor stop cracking his knuckles obsessively? Are these actions that you’re willing to take? It’s time to assess whether the benefits (not enduring a crowded, two-transfer subway ride, not hearing that cringe-worthy popping sound) are worth the trade-offs (a car loan, a hurt coworker who gives you the cold shoulder) and make your go or no go decision accordingly. If you opt to act, you’ve taken a solid step to addressing your stress points. If you decide not to, it’s time to proceed to the final step.

Step 3

Reframe

So, you’ve figured out that either A) there’s nothing you can do to eliminate the conditions causing your work stress or B) there are things you could do, but they come with downsides that you’re unwilling to deal with. What then? It's time to reframe the story with a little cognitive behavioral therapy, so that you're the one in the driver's seat. The object is to get from “I hate my job, but I can’t find anything else. The economy sucks and I’m just stuck here.” to the much more palatable and empowering “My immediate needs are shelter, food and student loan payments. My job provides me with the capacity to meet these needs, therefore I choose to commit my time to working at it.”

In their book, Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel By Changing How You Think, Greenberger and Padesky discuss the use of thought records. When you’re dealing with an anxious or stressful thought, you’re supposed to write it down, write down the feelings it produces and the instinctive conclusions your stressed-out brain draws from them. You then list the evidence that supports your instinctive reaction and the evidence that undermines it. Finally, you use the non-supporting evidence to develop new conclusions that are more tempered and pragmatic than your initial Chicken Little panicking.

For example, maybe your boss points out a mistake in a spreadsheet you created.

Initial conclusions:

She hates me.

I’m terrible at my job.

I’m going to be fired.

Supporting evidence:

I made a stupid math mistake that a sixth grader could have caught.

She was impatient when pointing out the error.

Our company is going through downsizing and has already eliminated five underperformers.

Contradictory evidence:

I noticed the mistake before she pointed it out and was already in the process of correcting it.

It is the end of the fiscal year and she has been under a lot of stress lately to cut our department’s budget by 10%.

My last performance review was excellent.

Revised conclusion:

It was embarrassing to make a careless error, but I took responsibility for it and will double-check my work in the future.

It’s not necessary to write out each step – at least not after the first few times you’ve worked through the exercise - but once you’ve gotten a handle on the process, it becomes second nature to do a quick five-minute reframe of your unhappy instinctive reactions when you find your stress levels soaring.

Bottom Line

Workplace stress isn’t going anywhere and until the economy picks up, you probably aren’t either. You can take concrete actions to manage the factors spiking your blood pressure or you can stop trying to control those beyond your influence and work on reframing your negative perceptions of your work environment.